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World’s oldest tattoos were made of soot

Ötzi during the sampling of the tattooed skin areas in the Archaeological Museum in Bozen, Italy.

(Image:Maria Anna Pabst)

For those inclined to put ink to flesh, modern tattoo parlours offer dizzying arrays of dyes – mercury-containing reds, manganese purples, even pigments that glow in the dark.

Getting inked wasn’t always quite so complicated, however. A new analysis concludes that the world’s oldest tattoos were etched in soot.

Belonging to Ötzi the 5300 year old Tyrolean iceman, the simple tattoos may have served a medicinal purpose, not a decorative one, says Maria Anna Pabst, a researcher at the Medical University of Graz, Austria, who trained optical and electron microscopes on biopsies of Otzi’s preserved flesh. See a gallery of photoscans of Ötzi’s body.

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Crosses and bands

Clothing would have obscured most of the designs, which are of crosses and bands of lines. Some are located near acupuncture points.

Alpine climbers discovered Ötzi near the Italian-Austrian border in 1991. Since then, scientists have analysed his clothing, diagnosed him with various ailments – arthritis, back and stomach problems – and even sequenced his mitochondrial genome.

To work out what Ötzi’s tattoos were made of, Pabst’s team applied light and electron microscopes to minutely thin sections of several tattoos as well as a non-tattooed flesh from his inner thigh.

Soot ink

A close look at his tattooed skin revealed numerous fine particles, interspersed with elongated crystals. Chemical analysis indicated that the particles were made of double-bonded carbon atoms found in soot, while the crystals were made of silicate. His tattoo-free skin, on the other hand, showed no trace of soot particles. Ötzi’s “ink” could have been scraped off silicate-containing rocks surrounding a fireplace, Pabst says.

“When you look at the body of the iceman – I was there when the body was taken out – you can’t see anything that tells you how [the tattoos] were made,” she says. Perhaps, Ötzi’s brethren used thorns to pierce the skin deeply enough to inject a soot ink.